In 1983, when I was graduating from high school, I discovered the existentialists. I read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegard, with much fascination. These authors developed a world view I could relate to, living under Ronald Reagan as President and the threat of Russian missiles being everpresent.
The world seemed cold (cold war) and didn't seem to be intelligible. I, being an optimist at bottom really, never sunk into nihilism, but I certainly did feel alienated.
Looking back, I shouldn't have wasted my time. Not having discovered depth psychology yet, I had no real portrait of the human soul painted in my mind yet. I did not understand I had an Ego, complexes and a personal and collective unconscious that was influencing me without my knowing.
The problem with existentialism, in hindsight, is that it does a brilliant job of portraying the alienation a modern individual can feel in the modern Cosmos, but stops there.
The Ego I learned does in fact become inflated and alienated from the rest of the self, casting one in an internal universe that seems now vast, stark, and mostly empty. Being Demiurgic, the Ego usurps other archetypal patterns such as the Child, the Mother, the Father and demands that it now alone is to be served.
Dreams being ignorred, along with other synchronicities that offer themselves up as doorways from the Self to Matter and the World, it becomes easy for an individual to feel isolated and 'against the world.'
Folks who are in this predicament are easy prey for the charms of existentialism.
But one must persevere and move on...beyond alienation.
The task becomes realizing the other elements of the self and beginning to integrate them into one's Self. To make the unconscious conscious and thus allow for the possibility of wholeness.
Hard work to be sure. Definitely it is easier to die in isolation.
But once one recognizes the other facets dwelling within, he begins to be moved by the energies of the archetypes again and begins to develop libido (life force) again and can begin to take the slow, painful, but now conscious steps out of the void and into the Cosmos charged with Life and Meaning.
1 comment:
I used to contemplate this... Perception being a quantum of conciousness... but kind of put my thoughts on hold about this matter for a few reasons... one, I'm not convinced people/the mind (& hope my writing is legible) really are not, or perhaps, will never and should never be in absolute control of what there is to percieve.
Really glad to find your blog. Love the art... and oh, your poetry is engaging as well.
ummm... now you've got me to thinking;-) Does that negate what I wrote above? (laughing)
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